Not that long ago, accepted wisdom held that suburban Atlanta commuters would never abandon their cars and commute by a form of transportation as lowly as a bus. Now they're doing it by the thousands, with standing room only on express buses between downtown and the suburbs.

The program has become so popular that this year, the Georgia Regional Transportation Agency requested $13.3 million from the state Legislature to buy another 28 coaches to expand service.

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Of course, the request was denied.

Legislators did appropriate $7.3 million to build a horse barn and practice ring in Houston County, home of Gov. Sonny Perdue. They approved $4 million for a building at the Paulding County Regional Airport, in the home district of House Speaker Glenn Richardson, and $8 million to re-create the office of the late House Speaker Tom Murphy at the University of West Georgia.

But $13 million for new buses to ease the commuting crunch in metro Atlanta? Nah, waste of money.

Of course, that slight to the metro area pales in importance to the Legislature's last-minute rejection of a regional transportation-funding mechanism. That proposal, if approved by voters statewide, would have given metro Atlanta the means to tax itself to provide the funding it needs and that the state refuses to provide. All this raises a question: How long will metro-area legislators put up with such treatment of their constituents? More importantly, how long will metro-area voters put up with metro-area legislators who put up with such treatment?

MARTA remains the only major transit system in the country forced to survive without financial aid from state government. State officials have also refused to move on a commuter rail line from Lovejoy to Atlanta, even with federal money already committed. The so-called Brain Train, a commuter line linking Athens and the University of Georgia to downtown Atlanta and its universities at Emory, Georgia Tech and the Atlanta University schools, has also been kept on the back burners.

But if our predicament has gone largely unnoticed at the state Capitol, it is making news elsewhere. In a recent ranking, Forbes magazine listed Atlanta congestion as the worst in the country.

As Forbes described Atlanta to its nationwide, business-oriented readership, "more people flood the roadways than the infrastructure can handle. Commuters spend 60 hours a year stuck in traffic, second only to those in Los Angeles. If that weren't bad enough, Atlanta is so spread out that only 29 percent of drivers get to and from work in less than 20 minutes, the third-worst rate in the country, and 13 percent spend more than an hour getting to work, the fourth-worst rate in the country. The local train system doesn't service the entire city, and thus fails to relieve the pressure."

If you're a business leader contemplating a relocation or expansion, would Atlanta still be on your site list after reading that?

Now, with $4 gasoline looming, the situation gets even more difficult. Atlanta already had one of the most expensive commutes in the country — now, with a doubling of the price of gasoline, the impact on our economy doubles as well. And as Forbes points out, our lack of a rail infrastructure makes it hard to turn to alternatives.

A similar crunch is hitting the nation's freight industry. Eighteen-wheelers run on diesel, which has risen in price even faster than gasoline, and congestion in cities such as Atlanta has made moving freight by road more and more expensive and time-consuming.

As a result, freight movers are turning to rail, which can move three times as much freight as a truck on the same amount of diesel. Rail-industry profits have doubled since 2003, pushing stock values up as well. The price of Union Pacific stock has risen 19 percent in the last two months, while CSX stock has risen 36 percent.

Of course, the factors that are driving freight traffic off the highways and onto rail — congestion and high fuel prices — apply to moving people as well, as the popularity of express buses demonstrates. But Georgia's leadership lacks the vision to recognize that fact.

• Jay Bookman is deputy editorial page editor. His column runs Monday and Thursday.